Journey’s End
Square Enix’s Naoki Yoshida on FFXIV: Endwalker and beyond
By now, we’ve become accustomed to live events being cancelled and replaced with awkward digital substitutes. But still, the show must go on. After cancelling its 2020–2021 world tour, including what would have been a London stop this year, Final Fantasy XIV’s first Digital Fan Fest spared no expense (reportedly several hundred million yen) to bring the MMORPG’s developers and community together over two days streamed live from the Tokyo Garden Theatre.
We imagine that in-house band The Primals would have rather been playing its metal covers of the game’s songs in front of a rapturous, glowstick-waving crowd instead of a giant display of YouTube chat overlooking an empty auditorium. But if conditions were far from ideal, it didn’t seem to dampen spirits, with producer and director Naoki Yoshida having a grand time kicking things off in cosplay as the new Reaper job class, complete with a hefty scythe. Clearly, someone has managed to stay in shape through lockdown. Sitting down with Yoshida on a Zoom call, we resist asking him about his workout regime and focus instead on where this leaves the future of the Fan Fest event – and of the game he’s led for more than a decade.
“I do believe that for us there was really a huge amount of value in going through with the Fan Fest, and as far as I can see from the players’ comments as well, it resonated well with them,” Yoshida tells us. He also sees this digital event as an opportunity to try new approaches, such as the open cosplay corner, from which Square Enix can get ideas for how to evolve future Fan Fests. “We hope that our fans will be extremely glad and appreciate the amount of effort that we put into developing Final Fantasy XIV as a fun place for them.”
There was another reason the event had to go ahead: over the years, Fan Fests have been established as the occasions when new FFXIV expansions are announced, and this was no exception. Endwalker, the game’s fourth expansion, is set to conclude the epic saga that began when Yoshida took over the project, turning an unmitigated disaster into a widely beloved MMORPG, with more than 22 million registered players to date. The event set a solid release date, and revealed a new city, playable race, raid series and, of course, that new class, able to summon Void demons to aid them in battle.
Like the rest of the industry, Square Enix has had to adjust to remote working, a process that has affected Endwalker’s
development, causing
“several percentage drops in efficiency”, while the newly announced November release date is effectively a delay from a Final Fantasy
expansion’s typical summer release. Nonetheless, Yoshida assures us he hasn’t needed to apply his scythe to any planned content: “As soon as the Fan Fest finished, we were back in full drive working on this game.”
Indeed, he estimates that the expansion includes about “1.3 times as much story” as previous expansion Shadowbringers, already celebrated as one of the best stories told in FFXIV
and, indeed, the series as a whole. And, rather than the usual drip-feed of patch updates, it’ll all arrive at once. “When we are making an expansion, compared to a major update, there’s a clear difference in the amount of resources we can put into providing that climax,” Yoshida says. “So I really wanted to do a proper job of giving an impactful climax to the saga in 6.0.”
There’s a heavy sense of finality hanging over Endwalkers, from the expansion’s title to the associations that naturally follow the R\eaper’s arrival. That Square Enix’s Creative Business Unit 3 is also developing the forthcoming Final Fantasy XVI may imply that the team is ready to move on from the MMORPG – or at least take a well-earned break – but this couldn’t be further from the truth. After all, the game has just taken a step into its third console generation with the open beta of its PS5 edition. Yoshida instead refers to Endwalker as “a new dawn” (in contrast to Shadowbringers being ‘the black of night’), having committed to FFXIV as his life’s work. “It’s partly down to the great success of the story in Shadowbringers,” he says. “It really showed the players that through the Crystal Tower they can experience the past, the future, even travel to the 14 different variations of the world.” Having introduced the idea of parallel dimensions, it seems that the multiverse is where FFXIV’s future lies. “Of course there are limitations in the lore – we always have to think about the impact that the lore will have. But really, there’s so much that we have in mind that this could easily go on for another ten years, rest assured!”
Naoki Yoshida refers to Endwalker as “a new dawn”, having committed to FFXIV as his life’s work